The commission will begin to internally audit the election process after the votes are officially certified. A separate audit will be conducted by Metro’s Office of Internal Audit about the use of electronic poll books at precincts after several issues arose in the August election.

Deputy Administrator of Elections Joan Nixon said that in these audits, the commission typically examines internal and operational issues through the entire election year.

The issues that came up on Tuesday were typical of any high-turnout race, she said. Several precincts ran out of provisional ballots and change-of-address forms during the day and needed the Election Commission to restock them. The volume of calls forced the commission to stop taking calls from its general line.

Nixon said the biggest problem was beyond the commission’s control. In the first general election, after a once-a-decade redistricting process, many voters simply went to the wrong precinct.

“A lot of voters went to vote in the precinct they had before,” Nixon said. “Well, they don’t know that their new location was two streets back.”

She cited the use of electronic poll books that could identify a voter’s new precinct as an improvement that sped up the process.

Nixon said redistricting combined with the high turnout also led to a higher number of provisional ballots and other forms. When precincts ran out of paperwork as they had in previous elections, she said, election commissioners continually supplied them with the forms they needed.

More workers needed

She also said a higher than normal number of poll workers dropped out from the positions they had signed up for days before the election. She said the Election Commission must focus on bringing in more and younger poll workers during future races.

“It’s hard to get a lot of younger people out there to help,” she said.

Nixon was pleased with the number of 17-year-olds who worked at polling places because school was closed Tuesday. She said the Election Commission would try to keep recruiting from that demographic in the future.

Tennessee Citizen Action, an advocacy group led by Mary Mancini, received hundreds of calls about voting concerns, including long lines from a lack of poll workers. She said Tuesday’s poll workers needed help from the group’s poll watchers that were at precincts.

“For us to have poll workers ask our poll watchers to help them is inexcusable,” she said.

While several places in Davidson County dealt with a number of issues at the polls, few problems emerged because voters were required to provide a state or federally issued photo ID at the polls. Tuesday’s election was the first presidential race since the new regulations were implemented earlier this year.

The number of provisional ballots related to the new identification rules were “going to be a fraction of a fraction of 1 percent,” said state spokesman Blake Fontenay in an email last week.

Fontenay also said the secretary of state’s office was confident in the way the high-turnout election was handled. About 2.4 million people voted in the state.